LATIN AMERICA:
A Complicated Peace*

By William Ratliff and Edgardo Buscaglia

Late last year President Alvaro Arzu of Guatemala, the biggest country in Central America, signed a peace accord with guerrilla insurgents, ending the country's thirty-six-year civil war. How will Arzu bring economic growth to agricultural regions that don't even have clear land titles? Or political stability to a country in which 70 percent of the people see the legal system as a mere device of the white elite? Hoover fellows Edgardo Buscaglia Jr. and William Ratliff explain why negotiating the peace accord may have been the easy part

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William Ratliff is a research fellow and curator of the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research fellow of the Independent Institute. An expert on Latin America, China, and U.S. foreign policy, he has written extensively on how traditional cultures and institutions influence current conditions and on prospects for economic and political development in East/Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Edgardo Buscaglia was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution until 2008. He is also the director of the International Law and Economic Development Center at the University of Virginia School of Law, the vice president of the Inter American Law and Economics Association, and a legal and economic senior adviser to several international organizations in the United States and in Europe.